I was burning through tokens. And something more valuable: my time. Dan Sanchez showed me how to use ChatGPT Codex to edit Press Start. It could take a longer video, pick the storyline, and put the pieces together. I went from extreme stress to complete elation. Then I used up a lot of its tokens. And I had a thought: I'm already paying for Claude. May as well use that. What took Chat less than 10 minutes took Claude a lot longer. It did a pretty good job, but then it got caught up on the smallest things. Like accidentally cutting off words. And I was stubborn. I finally realized I could take what Claude had learned and bring it back into Chat. My time was worth more than I was giving it credit for. Has saving money ever cost you time? Finish this sentence in the comments: "I thought I was saving, but..." Press Start: The Road to 3,000. #SocialMediaExaminer# #SMMW27# #AIVideoEditing# #SunkCostBias#

I showed two of my team how my AI editor makes this show. One of them asked why I was showing her. My AI editor is called Blade. A viewer, Ray Edwards, named her. So I pulled up a fresh call and walked Jen and Lisa through it, start to finish. Download the Google Meet recording. Open Claude Code. Drop the file in. Type "begin scripting." That's it. It keeps my computer awake, transcribes the call, checks the story so far, and writes the outline, the hooks and the script. Then it pings me. In the middle of the demo, it did exactly that: "Mike, the October 29th script is ready." Lisa asked about the training docs. There aren't any. It was just an ongoing conversation. I like this. I don't like that. Over time I had it keep a document of everything we've ever said on this show. Every episode, who spoke, every timestamp. So when I asked it to find the flashback where we named the AI editor, it found it on its own. Lisa: "It's kind of mind blowing." Then: "Why are you talking to me about this?" Because I wanted them to see what's possible. Jen asked how long it's been. About 30 days. A few weeks ago I was the main character, the producer, the scriptwriter and the editor. Now Blade is a full scale producer of the show. I create the show and she takes care of the rest. What part of your work would you hand to an AI? Start your comment with "I'd hand off…" 👇 Press Start: The Road to 3,000. #SocialMediaExaminer# #SMMW27# #AIVideoEditing# #ClaudeCode#

I asked you to name my AI editor. You delivered. A while back I told you my AI video editor was getting so good it needed a real name. I asked you to drop ideas in the comments, and I promised to call out the winner. So I sat down with Jessica to make the call. First, a shout-out to Jonathan Mast. He's the one who said he'd love to see a weekly show, so now there is one: the best moments of the week, five or six minutes, on YouTube. My AI editor even made the thumbnails. The first ugly ones got no views at all. The new ones changed that. Jessica's take: "It really feels like you're watching a show and you know it's going somewhere." Then the big one. Ray Edwards left this comment: "Kubrick (or Stanley). Or... BLADE." Jessica had never heard of Stanley Kubrick. Stanley reminded me of a vacuum cleaner. She said, "Oh yeah, the Stanley Steamer." Kubrick doesn't roll off the tongue. But Blade? "Just has a cool factor sound to it." It cuts through the noise. And editing is all about cutting. I let Jessica make the final call. Blade it is. Then I asked her one more question: is Blade a guy or a woman? "Ooh, a woman." So meet Blade. She's our awesome editor. Thank you, Ray Edwards. Did we pick the right name? Reply Yes, or start your comment with "I'd have gone with…" 👇 Press Start: The Road to 3,000. #SocialMediaExaminer# #SMMW27# #AIVideoEditing# #ContentCreation#

AI found over 2,000 video clips from my conference to use in my ads. I rejected nearly all of them. Here's what happened. I'd just trained AI to make video ads from testimonials, and they came out beautiful. But I had this dream: what if it could go through the thousands of clips shot at the conference, find the right ones, and drop them in at the right moment? That's what good video editors do, right? So I asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to find me a solution. I landed on one tool and downloaded it. That process was a nightmare. It was limited to 500 videos a month. I have thousands. Then Claude said, "I know the tech stack this is built on. Why don't I just build this for you?" I'm all, let's do it. This is where things got really, really, really messy. AI had to watch literally everything. Hours. I was canceling meetings. I got fried in the brain. So I said, there's got to be a better way. Scrub all these clips and tell me which ones you think are best. It came back with the shots it liked as little animated GIFs. It built a searchable index: type "writing" and up come people taking notes. Click any clip and it shows you the key moments inside it. Then I trained it on how I wanted the cuts done, and it rebuilt one of our testimonial ads with b-roll. While I'm trying to get to 3,000, this whole system was born less than 48 hours ago. Would you let AI pick your clips? Reply "Yes" if you'd try it, or tell me where it would fall apart for you. Press Start: The Road to 3,000. #SocialMediaExaminer# #SMMW27# #AIVideoEditing# #AIinMarketing#

AI cut a four-minute testimonial into a video ad. I just prompted. It took about 90 minutes. I asked for a new skill whose only job is 9 by 16 vertical video ads. First, my team recorded a bunch of really well-done video ads for another event, and I told Claude to study them and tell me what they have in common. Cold open on the face. A five-beat arc. Captions that are super short. Then came the fights. The end card. It struggled with the palm trees, so I ended up over on ChatGPT. The first mock looked a little too much like Hawaii. The second one actually looked really great. The music. I asked Gemini, because Gemini is multimodal, and we ended up with high energetic percussion. The tracking. Sean Cannell moves around a lot. I had to train it to follow him. And then it took the raw clip, figured out the key points, tracked in on Sean, and created the ad you see in the video. While I'm trying to get to 3,000, I now have a system where I can give it raw video footage. This is literally being done on my desktop. Have you used AI to actually edit a video? Reply "Yes" if you have, and tell me what you used. Press Start: The Road to 3,000. #SocialMediaExaminer# #SMMW27# #AIVideoEditing# #AIinMarketing#